George Harrison

George Harrison: The Quiet One Who Kept Winning

Frank Sinatra used to introduce "Something" as the greatest love song of the past fifty years. He was talking about a track written by the third-ranked songwriter in his own band, a man who for most of a decade had to fight to get two compositions onto an album. That is the shape of George Harrison's whole career: consistently underestimated, including by himself, and then vindicated late.

The Boy on the School Bus

He was born in Liverpool on 25 February 1943 and grew up in Wavertree. He met Paul McCartney on the school bus. In 1958, aged fifteen, he auditioned for John Lennon and was admitted to the Quarrymen — the youngest of them, and the one who would be treated as the junior member for the next twelve years.

That treatment mattered, and the standard accounts are direct about it: his years of struggle to get his own songs onto Beatles records contributed significantly to the band's break-up. Being the third writer in a group containing Lennon and McCartney is a specific kind of professional misfortune.

Two Songs an Album

From 1965 he began to force the door. Most albums after that carried at least two Harrison compositions, and the list is not a consolation prize: "Taxman," "Within You Without You," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Something," "Here Comes the Sun." By 1969 even McCartney had conceded the point in public — "his songs are at least as good as ours."

The guitar playing followed the same principle as the writing. Jann Wenner, who founded *Rolling Stone*, described him as "a guitarist who was never showy but who had an innate, eloquent melodic sense." He was the rarest thing in a lead guitarist: someone who played less than he could.

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Ravi Shankar and the Sitar

In 1965 David Crosby introduced him to Indian classical music and, through it, to Ravi Shankar. Harrison studied sitar with Shankar from 1966 to 1968, and the consequence was what Shankar himself called "The Great Sitar Explosion" of 1966–67 — a sudden Western appetite for an instrument almost nobody in Europe or America had heard two years earlier.

The engagement went well past the instrument. He took up Transcendental Meditation in 1967 and later attached himself to the Hare Krishna movement; the religion is in the songs, not decorating them. And when Delaney Bramlett taught him slide guitar around 1969, Harrison put it to a use nobody else had thought of: he used the slide to imitate the vocal, sliding pitch of Indian instruments such as the sarangi. The famous late-Harrison guitar tone is an English rock musician playing a Hawaiian technique in an Indian idiom.

All Things Must Pass

When the Beatles ended, he had a decade of rejected material stockpiled. *All Things Must Pass*, released in 1970, was a triple album — an absurd format for a debut — and it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Its single, "My Sweet Lord," topped the charts and then, in 1976, cost him a plagiarism suit: a judge found the song too close to the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" and ruled that Harrison had plagiarized it subconsciously.

Bangladesh

In August 1971, with Ravi Shankar, he put more than forty thousand people into Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh. It was the first benefit concert on that scale, and the template every subsequent one has followed. The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Films, Wilburys, and Friar Park

He kept starting things. Dark Horse Records in 1974. HandMade Films in 1978, co-founded for the specific purpose of producing Monty Python's *Life of Brian* — an act of patronage that put one of the best British comedies ever made onto screens. In 1988 he assembled the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, hiding as "Nelson Wilbury"; the first album went to number three in America and was certified triple platinum.

On 30 December 1999 a man named Michael Abram broke into Friar Park, Harrison's house, and stabbed him more than forty times, puncturing a lung. Olivia Harrison stopped the attack with a fireplace poker and a lamp. He spent weeks in hospital.

Why George Is Called a Genius

The strongest claim is not about songwriting, though the songwriting is good enough to carry a lesser argument. It is that Harrison performed an act of cultural translation that nobody else in Western popular music attempted at anything like that depth. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's citation names it exactly: the "quiet Beatle" whose "rich inner life yielded a prolific oeuvre that introduced the Western world to Eastern musical and spiritual influences."

The specific intellectual quality is that he did the work. Plenty of 1960s musicians added a sitar to a track for colour. Harrison studied with Shankar for two years, absorbed the modal and drone-based structures rather than the surface timbre, and then — this is the clever part — found a way to keep using them after he put the sitar down, by importing the technique into slide guitar. "Within You Without You" is not a rock song with Indian decoration; it is an Indian-form composition on a Beatles record. That is synthesis rather than borrowing, and it required patience, humility toward a tradition, and an ear for structure rather than effect.

The counter-case is worth stating plainly. The body of work is thin relative to the reputation: roughly a dozen great Beatles songs, one enormous solo album, one supergroup, and long stretches where he was more producer, financier and enthusiast than composer. His most famous solo song was found in court to be someone else's melody, which is an awkward fact in any argument about originality, even given the "subconscious" finding. And his reputation is measured on a warped scale — being the third-best writer in the Beatles makes an artist look both smaller than he was (against Lennon and McCartney) and larger (because the suppression narrative flatters everything he did manage to release). Tom Petty's memorial line — "He had a very keen sense of humor, very keen sense of spirit" — is affectionate rather than analytical, and much of what is written about Harrison is the same. The durable claim is narrower: he was a first-rate melodist, an exceptionally tasteful guitarist, and the only major Western pop musician of his era who genuinely learned another civilization's music instead of quoting it.

Legacy

He died of lung cancer that had spread to his brain, in Los Angeles, on 29 November 2001, aged fifty-eight. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges and the Yamuna near Varanasi according to Hindu rite, and he left an estate of around £100 million. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: with the Beatles in 1988, and alone in 2004, inducted by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, with Olivia and Dhani Harrison accepting on his behalf. Every stadium benefit concert since 1971 is descended from Bangladesh; every Western musician who has taken a non-Western tradition seriously rather than decoratively is working in ground he broke.